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About two and half years ago I wrote Beyond Blogging: Real-Time Intimate Reality on my old blog Planet P.
Well, it looks like one of the key technologies I speculated about now has a working prototype called Reality Fly Through developed by computer scientists at UCSD. Here's the link to some video demos.
On the one hand these technologies could be used for surviellance by those at the top, on the other hand, these same technologies as I pointed out will radically democratize and decentralize surviellance into what Steve Mann calls sousveillance.
3 minutes², by French art collective Electronic Shadow, expands architectural space of a reduced volume via interartive and enhanced imagery. The space reconfigures itself in response to the individuals activities and over time.
'3 minutes² is an installation mixing space and image, real and virtual and proposes a hybrid habitat metamorphosing endlessly around its inhabitant. Hybridising of space with images, fusion of material with immaterial, architecture of memory and information design, the habitat isn’t only measured by its surface but by the sum of its potential dimensions. Parallel realities melt in one space-time, 3minutes are a space, 10 square meters are a space. 3 minutes² is a surface-time, a hybrid space living according to its inhabitant’s rhythm, his trace, his electronic shadow.
3 minutes² is an installation presenting an extremely reduced living unit. This space has the particularity to extend beyond its physical borders via the image, the space being its projection surface. This volumes demultiplies thus in as many functions as the ones described in the scenario of use of this living space.
In fact, the space permanently reconfigures itself according to its inhabitant’s activities and also defines itself in time. The scenario presents in a few minutes the compression of most activities and functions taking place in the habitat and corresponding to its inhabitant daily life, eating, sleeping, working, etc.
The inhabitant himself is contained in the image, represented as a silhouette. This shadow which represents the projection of a neutral individual in this habitat is the installation’s neuralgic centre, the habitat building itself around him as a cocoon, a more cultural than a natural extension; the habitat becomes then a character.
The presented functions correspond to vital needs and also to more complex behaviours. 3 minutes² doesn’t try to caricaturise the habitat’s functions but to draw the shape of a daily life deeply modified by technologies and the presence of the virtual, or the materialisation of immaterial.
Beyond the traditional functions adapted to this type of habitat, some activities are directly linked to this conception of space and inevitably induce radical changes in the political, economical and social organisation.
The status of the image compared to the space is permanently ambiguous, is it an individual’s printed memory in his habitat, the virtual reflect of a real life or the scale 1 model of a future space, prefigurating the use of technologies in development, such as the nanotechnologies?
3minutes² doesn’t answer to this question but tends to shift the traditional debate opposing real to virtual. Here, hybridation of real and virtual is fictively acquired and becomes the ground for the proposition of a habitat which anticipates the technological and social modifications making it possible.
No screens, no visible interfaces, the two characters touch the walls, make movements, the habitation responds to them. The technology has become totally invisible and the effect of technologic becomes then magic.'
Mark Pesce just turned me on to the most amazing piece of software I've come across in years. It's called Starry Night.
It starts out innocent enough. You pick your location on earth, and it places you on the ground looking up towards the night sky as it is at this very moment. And this is where the true magic begins. As you zoom in and out of the sky, you are able to look at thousands of stars and other phenomena.
Within 15 minutes I was able to spot the International Space Station as it is orbiting the earth right now. At the moment of this post (11:42pm) it was coming over the Pacific towards the South American Coast at 18,000 mph. Keep in mind this simulation is in real-time!! Within a few more minutes I found dozens of satellites orbiting the earth. Then as I pointed further outward I was able to zoom in on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, etc. I was able to see Uranus as it would look from earth at this exact moment in time.
All this was occurring from the ground of my hometown. Then I discovered the Spaceship Mode! I flew away from the earth. First I started heading away at a few km/sec and noticed I was getting anywhere very fast. So I sped up to 1000km/sec and I noticed that I was now slowly approaching the moon. I passed around the moon, and noticed that the dark side is fully lit, as it is located between the sun and earth at this moment. I sped up further and flew out towards Jupiter. I was traveling at about 10 times the speed of light, and it still was taking me at least several minutes to get there, so I sped up to about 500 times the speed of light and saw Jupiter and all of its moons approaching rapidly. I slowed down and approached Europa within about 10,000 km. Amazingly all the detail from the Galileo Probe was right there in front of me!
I sped up further, this time heading out into the galaxy at 100,000 times the speed of light, within a minute or so I was passing Sirius, then I turned and headed towards Procyon, then Vega, and then further out still. And then I was hooked! The free version came to an end. But what an amazing ride. To see more I would need to purchase the full version with all the plugins. Luckily I got some money for Christmas so I purchased as my Christmas present.
Now I loaded the program again, and now there were over a hundred thousand stars to view up to 11th magnitude. Better still, I was able to leave the galaxy altogether and venture out into the local cluster. I first visited the Larger Magellenic Cloud, then to Andromeda, and then further still to the Virgo Cluster, where there are hundreds of galaxies. Starry Night uses OpenGL to render all these objects in beautiful 3 dimensions. So here I was flying like in the TV show Cosmos at millions of times the speed of light past galaxies.
StarryNight goes much further still. All of these stars, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters are all identifiable thru the options. As I fly around in my super-fast spaceship I can see all the objects and their names. The most amazing thing about it is all these objects are actually moving, since this is a real-time simulation. At one point I was near Io, and when I sped up the clock by x3000 times I watched as Jupiter and all its moons sped away from me. I could see all the moons rapidly orbiting the planet at high speed, as if I was actually there.
Also included with Starry Night are hundreds of Hubble images to enhance the zoom-in experience.
I cannot recommend this product highly enough!
Synesthesia is a mouthful. Or is it an eyeful? That's the beauty of it.
Synesthesia is a phenomena wherein you see audio, hear video. Your senses are confused, just like sentence this is.
Synesthesia often occurs under the influence of psychadelics. Acid, shrooms, your mileage may vary.
What I want to know is: can we invoke synesthesia while sober?
Well, help me guys. I'm trying this out.
Here, let me go through Jimi Hendrix's "Are you Experienced?" Let's work on just colors for now.
0:00-0:13
The scratching feels like slate, so I'd say some light slate gray.
0:13-0:17
The crashing of guitars and sounds feels like blood and flesh, so I'm going with dark orange, and a shine of hotpink, like orgasm perhaps.
0:17-0:40
There are multiple layers going on here, the bass guitar, the percussion (is it keyboard?), and hendrix's vocals.
The bass feels colored like chocolate, the percussion sounds like big drops of water, so like straight up blue, and hendrix's voice is a dark announcement, calling my name at night: indigo
0:40-0:47
"But first, are you experienced?"
The drop off of the ambient background sounds is an entrance out of the tunnel of sound. Let's label this with light, white colors, like azure, mintcream, lavendar blush.
0:47-1:10
(chorus)
Hendrix gets warmer, the early scratchy effect returns, and everything just has more energy.
I'd increase the hue on everything, throw in back the slate gray, and since hendrix is warmer, let's make this have more fireball red.
-------------
And on it on it goes. One could visualize all sorts of elements of design: lines, shapes, directions, sizes, textures, colors, etc..
Is it possible, that with persistent training with this kind of method, one could develop a knack for synesthesia?
I also tried listening to SomaFM's Drone Zone on high volume with headphones, and tried to scribble in photoshop the colors I heard.
Henyway, just a thought for you adventurers out there. And if you are an expert on this topic--I know you're out there--please, add some comments.
From Slashdot:
"Researchers at Human Media Lab, Queen's University in Canada presented the ECSGlasses: eye contact sensing glasses that report when people look at their wearer. When eye contact is detected, the glasses stream this information to appliances to inform these about the wearer's engagement. According to HML.Blog the ECSGlasses uses a wearable, wireless Eye-Contact Sensor (1.3MB .jpg) to gauge when the user receives eye-contact from an onlooker. eyeBlog uses this information to record and publish face-2-face conversations without dividing the user's attention between the event being recorded, and the device being used to record it. Moreover, because eyeBlog uses eye-contact to start and stop recording, users do not need to sift through hours of footage to find interesting segments. If you are the academic type you can read the paper (2.2MB .pdf), otherwise the video in .mpg (1:49min, 320x240, 7.5MB), or mp4 (1:49min, 320x240, 4.9MB) should explain everything. Video Mirror: .mp4 .mpg."That is weird and cool, of course. I'm not sure why I'd only want to capture people's picture when they're looking at me, but it could be useful added information of course. Like, if it were combined with face recognition software, and my glasses tells me who somebody is just before they start talking to me. There are some obvious problems in the scheme, of course, like that not everybody looks at each other when they're conversing, and the norms for this change from culture to culture. But just the ability to capture the picture of everybody who looks at me could ensure that I have the most obvious source material for good pictures of them. The glasses look kind of bizarre, with a series of LEDs bouncing light off of people's faces, and back into a cyclops camera in the middle. That itself would be enough to get people to stare directly at you. In horror, maybe. But I bet there are ways of making it all smaller and less visible.
I agree with Jon Husband that technology alone is not the source of our enlightenment. I think positive change comes from subjective, deeply felt experience. But I think many of these tools have the potential to empower us to touch and feel the world in increasingly new and intimate ways. Sure, they they can just as easily be used to disconnect socially. But being that humans are largely social creatures, internet connectivity brings the world closer toghether than tears it apart, and will inceasingly do so as wiresless computing becomes ubiquitous.
David Weinberger mentioned the echo-chamber effect as a side effect of this connectivity, but this happens anyway among our peers. The internet connects us to more people of like mind, which in turn increases the overall level of intimacy than we would otherwise have.
In some people's eyes the bigger issue is why is the average American (not sure about Canadians), so socially alienated from their physically proximate neighbors? I think it's because our culture has celebrated the individual more than the most previous cultures.
Will these connecting technologies increase the amount of echo-ing at the cost of our already increasingly alienating physically proximate neighborhors? Or does this change is social space from physical proximity to mental/emotional proximity facilitated by the Internet, make our physical locations less relevant, both to ourselves and society as a whole?
I think the Internet, by allowing you to make a greater number of connections, increases the level of intimacy we have with those online buddies, which in turn enhances our sense of individuality. Whereas physical proximate space most often has us in proximity to a random mesh of values, beliefs, and social customs, which increases the pressure for us to adhere to the perceived collective norms.
Coming soon are location-based services, bringing more of physical space into cyberspace. Combine this with p2p social networking software and you could seriously increase the level of intimacy and connectivity possible with like-minded people who are close to you physically.
Imagine this. It's about 10 years from now, and almost everyone has a real-time always-on connection to the Net via ubiquitous wearable "augmented reality" devices. As part of this package, made possible with advance minuturized heads-up displays, video cameras, location aware devices, GPS, swarmbots, emotion-sensitive and adaptive algorithms (i.e. Affective Computing), and sophisticated reputation systems, you are able to surf an augmented version of reality itself in real time.
Lets break this down. You would be able to, in real-time see precisely whats going on almost anywhere in the globe by jacking in to the collection of real-time video blogs. As part of this collection, sophisticated 3-D rendering engines would be able to take the collective video footage and extropolate a real-time VR scene, allowing you to transcend the viewing angle of any single camera. Better still, you could jack in to that part of the world from a variety of, not only physical perspectives, but political, intellectual, and emotional as well based on whatever any individual user makes public as part their unique sliding-scale trust system such as the type that Joi Ito has proposed with moblogs. All of this meta-data would form its own collective smart-mob based on individually selected criteria.
What this means is that you could then view the "scene" from virtually any angle. Imagine the possibility here. Some spontaneous news event occurs, and almost instantly as hundreds of people appear on the scene with wearable video cameras broadcasting on the net, you would be able to view this real-time scene from any angle, while simultaneously gaining the collective emotional assessment of the situation from those people choosing to broadcast their emotional indices, as well as the blogging that will invariable start occuring at rapid pace from your customized reputation/trust criteria.
All of this combines to gives you a real-time augmented, yet customized view of real-time reality. One that is rich in social and emotional context, providing and extending intimacy by empowering you to feel and touch the world in entirely new ways.
Taking this idea further, these same wearable devices coule be interfaced with a seamless array of increasingly minuturized bio-monitoring feedback equipment which constantly asseses your physiological and cognitive states. Using adaptive algorithms, they could continually learn about your internal emotional states and in turn provide you with increasingly effective feedback signals to optimize physiological responses to stressful situations.
As Max More wrote in 1997, in his article From Enhanced Senses to Experience Machines:
By employing the neuroscientific understanding now starting to emerge, and by combining that knowledge with new internal neurological sensors, we may achieve an unprecedented level of self-awareness and self-control. For example, micromachines or nanomachines could monitor levels of neurohormones and neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline, pregnenolone, cortisol, vasopressin, and GABA, as well as activation levels of neural layers and subunits. The information about changes in neural activity could be converted into visual, auditory, or somatic signals when we enter desired or undesired emotional or cognitive states. Through biofeedback mechanisms we may then be able better to modify our moods and thoughts. By tying abstract emotional states to percepts we can more easily monitor and regulate those states.
Over the next couple of decades, then, we can expect technology to increase our sensory contact with reality, both external and internal. Far from cutting us off from the world or alienating us from ourselves, new technologies will give us more penetrating, discriminating, and illuminating senses.